Word: cuernavaca
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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That theme?spirituality?is stressed more and more these days by activist members of the ministry. Ivan Illich, who gave up the formal priesthood to work on his educational theories at the Center for Intercultural Documentation in Cuernavaca, Mexico, insists that the proper outcome of any of the new ministries is "an intimate personal awareness of the meaning of religion." The psychedelic generation's most revered and thoughtful guru, former Episcopal Priest Alan Watts, now living in Sausalito, Calif., argues that church services ought to offer "more opportunity for meditation and spiritual experience." Monsignor Robert Fox, director of New York...
When Don Sergio, 61, became bishop of Cuernavaca in 1952, he did not enter the job as an innovator. Then, shortly after his consecration, he spent some time at Father Grégoire Lemercier's fledgling Benedictine monastery in the Cuernavaca suburbs, where he was impressed with both the pastoral uses of the monks' experimental worship services and the strikingly different religious art that complemented them. The bishop asked the monastery's principal artist, Fray Gabriel Chávez de la Mora, to help him refurbish the city's 400-year-old cathedral. Gloomy Victorian clutter...
...Idleness. Somehow, everyone stays a part of the Catholic community in Cuernavaca. Gregoire Lemercier and most of his monks are now laymen, operating a psychoanalytic center near the old monastery grounds. Their elegant religious art is still sold on the cathedral grounds, and Lemercier, now married, is still close to the bishop. Ivan Illich's center, legally a secular institution, is now secular in mood as well, and currently has a record enrollment of more than 600, including many non-Catholics. Méndez Arceo still speaks warmly and publicly of Illich's "participation in Cuernavaca...
...clue to the success of Don Sergio's all-embracing pastorate may lie in the work of a protege, Father William Bryce Wasson. Wasson missed ordination in the U.S. because of poor health, came to Cuernavaca to recuperate, and was ordained by Méndez Arceo. Today he presides over a remarkable orphanage that Psychoanalyst Erich Fromm recently praised as "really rare-an institution that has happy orphans." The secret, says Fromm, is that each of Wasson's 900 orphans knows "he will not be expelled or abandoned for any reason"-yet at the same time...
...rather, says Leroy Hoinacki, a former Illich colleague now at U.C.L.A., "a symbol and a source of inspiration. It is a joyful place, with no fear, no suspicion. Any young priest, sister or layman who has hopes of being a Christian, especially within the structure, looks to Cuernavaca and Don Sergio. They are living the Gospel as it should be lived." German Catholic Theologian Johannes Metz agrees. Don Sergio's benign but active leadership, says Metz-who is dedicating a new book on church reform to the bishop -provides a model of diocesan government that could profitably be emulated...